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I generally don't sleep well. Throughout the development of Curiosity, I didn't sleep well at all. But the night before she touched down, I slept better than I had in years — literally in years. We had done everything we could. We were too close to Mars to change anything. It was up to the fates.

I woke up around 5:30 a.m., got ready, had breakfast. I had a very nice breakfast: a fried egg, a piece of toast, and a cup of tea. My wife was nine months pregnant at the time, and I kissed her goodbye and said, "Okay, baby, let's see what happens today." Really, the day was kind of diffuse. I went to work, got an atmosphere report. There were some meetings. I had enough time to give a lecture in Pasadena — which was better than just sitting around. Then I went back, essentially to worry. I tried to have a big lunch, and that was not a good idea. It sat like a softball in my stomach. I was really starting to feel it by then. I'd spent nine years of my life on this. We'd spent $2.5 billion. Maybe 85 percent of the people in my life, my dearest friends, had worked on this with me. I just didn't want to let anybody down.

Because the landing system looked a bit outlandish, because it was so audacious — in fact, we had secretly named the descent stage Audacity — if it didn't work, I felt like we'd just be hung out to dry. Of course it wasn't going to work, you idiots. What were you thinking? I really felt like we didn't have any shelter.

I met with the entire team again, maybe around 6:00 p.m. We all shook one another's hands, and then the team separated into two different rooms — the Control Room and the War Room. I was in the Control Room. There are big screens on the sides of the room, rows of monitors, big, long benches. I sat down at my console at the front of the room. Allen Chen was to my right, doing the public commentary. My deputy, Miguel San Martin, was to my left. We were just observers, really, watching the data come in. The only decision we had to make that night was how to explain to people what had happened, good or bad. Eventually, I just got up and started pacing. When I rationally thought about the risks — and I'd written down every risk I could think of — I came to the conclusion that the odds of success were overwhelmingly in our favor. That said, I couldn't help but think there was something we were forgetting. Emotionally, honestly, I felt we would fail. I just couldn't imagine this thing being successful. It was just too crazy. So I was rationally confident and emotionally terrified, if that makes any sense.

We had one moment of serious panic. There was just a second when we thought our attitude was off, way off, when we first hit the atmosphere — out of bounds in a catastrophic fashion. I was like, No way. My stomach dropped to the floor. But then a couple of seconds later, everything seemed fine. After that, it was just absolutely smooth. I caught myself thinking, Is this really going to happen?

To confirm the touchdown, we had three different data checks. I was the person who would take those three things and deem it okay for Allen to announce that we'd touched down. First I heard "tango delta nominal," which meant she had touched down at expected speeds. Then "RIMU stable." That was good. And then last, we had nice persistent UHF data out of the rover for ten seconds. It was alive. I think I poked Allen in the back and he said, "Touchdown confirmed, we're safe on Mars." We'd done it. Then the room, it just ... I hugged Miguel; I hugged Allen. It was pretty emotional. Maybe two or three minutes later, we got our first pictures. They went up on the big screens. They were black-and-white and murky, but there it was: a wheel on gravelly ground. Looking at those images was a very powerful experience for me. Numbers are too abstract. This was proof. You think up some crazy shit and you spend hundreds of millions of dollars building it with people you love, and then you launch it on a rocket and it works. It all worked. I look at those pictures today, and I'm still a little floaty, a little cloudlike. That night, it was just totally surreal.

We did a press conference, and then I went to a local bar that had stayed open for us. It was maybe 1:30 in the morning. I was pretty burnt, but it was a pretty wild party. The whole place was jumping. I can remember standing on top of the bar at some point. It was a big night. And then we had our baby — a baby girl, Olive — a few weeks later, on August 31, the night of the Blue Moon. August 2012, man. That was some kind of month.